Here you described when it happens.When awareness washes over me, which it does a few times per day, or something does, it is still. It grabs my attention. How do I know? A feeling in my head and body. It's as if something is saying, Hey! Look! It is here! But really, nothing is there. Nothing new at least. It seems to come when I am most busy, most lost in thought, and I do not always 'sink in' to it. If I keep on task, it goes away. If I give it my attention, it seems to deepen while I am focused on it. But 'I' remain while focused. Or at least the sense of something looking out my eyes does.
Yes, so what is it? Is it sensations, sounds, smells, tastes, images?What it is, I don't know. it doesn't seem to be thought.
There's no need to go to thought for the answer. Remember, direct experience is: sensation, sound, thought/image, smell, taste.I see every tiny molecule moving, the space and objects become the same thing, or I see that they are made up of the same thing. Am I seeing energy? Is this awareness? Or is awareness something 'other' that this is all occurring in? Sometimes everything turns white, flat. No distance. I am trying to just let things unfold, just notice what is happening around me.
Is this what you mean? I am not sure.
Sound seems to disappear during all of this, the visual field is so interesting.
I guess the answer is no, I am not clearer on what awareness is.
To use an analogy. Let's say a car goes past. I ask you to look and see what colors are in the car. If it's a red car with black tires, and other detailing, the answer might be red, black, blue etc.
What you're doing is telling me how fast the car goes, how it becomes the background, how amazing it is, and so on :)
The one thing you told me about direct experience was that there is a sensation in the chest. So then we would ask: Is that sensation lori/self?This is in reference to self. In this mornings meditation I felt love and sadness for Lori. I looked in a different way today, before I had feeling of pushing Lori out, making her go away attached to my search. Today I only looked. In my body, I feel her in my chest. When in meditation, it is if i float up, so finding her caused me to go down, which I was loathe to do, so i left her there, and went up to blackness, not finding her 'up' there. Does that make sense?
Do you see how simple this is?
If I say 'I feel like the self is behind my eyes' and there's a thought that says 'that's me', then I would explore:
The sensations behind the eyes, is that me?
The thought 'that's me', is that me?
That's all that is needed. Anything else is thinking and concepts.
The reason I had you do vipassana noting is to see that in direct experience there is only see hear feel smell taste + thought. That's it. Very simple :)
